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WillWonka Looks at the 2007 WSOP through Twenty-Nine Events

We are halfway through the fifty-five event marathon that is the World Series of Poker. With so much change in the poker industry since last year's WSOP, there were some key questions heading into June:

How was attendance going to be? Was the UIEGA going to cause less participation?

Will we continue to see the rise of young stars or will the veterans make their presence felt.

Would Doyle, Johnny or Phil win an 11th bracelet?

How am I going to keep up with everything? Is the information I want to see going to be out there?

From my accounting and fantasy football commissioner background, I am a stats guy. So let's look at some stats, both coming into the Series and looking at where we stand through 29 tournaments.

Before the WSOP, who were we anticipating to make waves in it? I can think of two sources to maybe get a clue (Betting odds and Player of the Year Standings). Compliments of Ladbrokes.com, I was able to find the favorites for the Main Event which we can extrapolate down for our purposes. Those names include:

Or lastly maybe Main Event money winners from recent years such as Jamie Gold, Steve Dannenmann, David Williams, Paul Wasicka, Greg Raymer, Joe Hachem or even Chris Moneymaker.

Time will only tell. Luckily, I have had some time to dissect what is going to happen. Twenty-nine events have completed as of this writing. I think the question of whether or not the WSOP will keep on growing has been answered. We have had eight tournaments with 1,000 or more entries (three with over 2,000). We saw an increase of 8% in the first $1.5k NLH event and a 14% surge in the $500 Ladies Event. There has been almost $49,000,000 in prizes. 2,062 different people have cashed in the twenty-nine tournaments. We have had seventeen people make multiple final tables including the Costa Rican, shark toting pro, Humberto Brenes making three final tables. We have 226 different people with multiple cashes this year. Nobody has yet to win more than one bracelet; but it is sure worth noting that the poker brat himself, Phil Hellmuth Jr. worked his way through over 2,600 people to win his 11th bracelet. I think if I was a betting man, Phil would have been the one that I would have put my 10 bucks on.

So, without further adieu, let's take a look at the leaders thus far in the 38th World Series of Poker. Since I couldn't find a single source that listed the money leaders from all of the tournaments to form a single money leaders list, I took it upon myself to make a spreadsheet (again the accountant in me) and tabulate the results myself. I want to thank sites such as Poker Pages, Poker News, and Worldseriesofpoker.com for helping get these numbers. Having done this myself, these are unofficial and mostly unaudited due mostly to different spellings of the names on the results list; but here is a listing (top 100) of how things have gone thus far in the WSOP.

We have some big names, some not so big names and some big names that you may not have ever heard of; but that will have to be another discussion for another day.

I will follow this up with more information in the coming days. So for others who are like me and not fortunate enough to be in Las Vegas catching the action first hand, I'll try to keep you updated on what is going on